The Sony PS2 Linux kit has been shipping for nearly
a month now, and I'm frankly astonished at how little
I've seen on this mailing list about it. For better or
for worse, this changes everything for MIPS/Linux.
The number of MIPS/Linux users worldwide has
just gone up by at least an order of magnitude,
and they are on a platform running a 2.2.1-derived
kernel and using gcc 2.95.2.
It's a perfectly usable platform out of the box, but
Carsten has thrown "crashme" at it, and it goes down
relatively quickly. People trying to port kaffe and
other programs that do double-precision float are
blocked because there's no double precision on the
R5900, and the Sony kernel lacks the Algorithmics
emulator.
It's not clear what Sony is going to put into further
development, and what they are going to expect the
user community to take over from here. There is a
group of people trying to take the kernel up to
2.2.20, but I'm not yet sure whether they know
what they are doing, and anyway, that box needs
to get to 2.4.x ASAP.
I respectfully submit that, within a year, any
MIPS/Linux source tree that does not support
the PS2 will be considered obsolete. And that
quite specifically includes the one at oss.sgi.com.
I personally would want to approach this in terms
of merging the necessary PS2 code into something
that could be expressed as a patch over kernel.org's
2.4.19_or_better, and which would be provded
as the default MIPS kernel technology by MIPS
and SGI servers, and ultimately by kernel.org.
Is no one else here working on this?
Regards,
Kevin K.